The State of Search

Elisabeth Osmeloski, Director of Audience Development, Search Engine Land and Marketing Land, talks about her journey in selecting and implementing marketing automation, and the impact on revenue that has come as a result.

These figures do not include mobile search, which is an increasingly large share of overall volume. Mobile now drives more than 30 percent of total US internet traffic.

After 15-20 years of hearing “SEO is Dead” – can we all just agree it’s not, and never will be?

Google rolls out ~500 to ~600 experiments / search changes in any given year. , Google is the IRS. SEOs are the Accountants necessary to stay on top of all the details.

Hummingbird & Semantic Search

Search Personas are an opportunity to apply audience insights & segment them based on where they are in the conversion funnel – by bucketing your landing pages / kws into groups, you can focus optimization efforts on content most likely to convert or drive users further down the funnel.

Many suspect Authorship was killed …. With the motive of driving more clicks back to PAID SEARCH ADS..

Many suspect Authorship was killed …. With the motive of driving more clicks back to PAID SEARCH ADS..

Of these in-the-trenches changes, the most important are: #4 – The old format sunsets in AUGUST 2014, just before holiday retail season #6 – mobile ads are growing #7 – could have significant implications for Google shopping #8 - search queries are still available in AdWords. Interestingly, the Matched Search Queries report in the AdWords section of Google Analytics still exists and continues to populate. #9 - it shows that Google is sitting on yet another trove of data, this one garnered from its Google Consumer Surveys (GCS) platform. It also underscores a larger effort to find new ways to incorporate ratings and reviews into ads in ways that can’t be manipulated by advertisers.

Clicks are up by 30 percent, mobile clicks rose by 133 percent from the previous year.

Adding Search Scale On the scale front — the number one request from advertisers — Bing is getting integrated into more third party platforms and devices as well as Microsoft’s own products, which should mean more search volume.

Bing is now an integral part of the Windows platform, and Cortana, Microsoft’s digital assistant, is the latest to have Bing integration, including personalized interest cards appearing on the Bing home page.

Apple announced in June that Bing would be included in its new version of Spotlight on the Mac OS X “Yosemite” operating system and iOS 8 mobile operating system — and dropping Google. Apple’s Siri already uses Bing for search. Amazon’s new Fire phone also uses Bing for search. And with Nokia, now owned by Microsoft, Bing gets in on both Windows phones and Android devices like the Nokia X phones.

Other partners include Yelp, Netflix, Facebook and Foursquare.

In another effort to help attract more big advertisers and deliver the scale they need, Bing Ads just increased the number of keywords advertisers can manage to 100,000. Pann says they’re planning to scale that to 1 million keywords by the end of the year.

search revenues were up and so were CPCs This was the 10th quarterly increase in search revenue for Yahoo

Aviate app was being quickly adopted and showed very high rates of engagement: more than 50 user interactions daily on average

>$350mm acquisition

In Flurry Yahoo gets both technology and reach (including internationally). Flurry operates its own in-app network but also can programmatically buy across mobile exchanges

170,000 developers use Flurry Analytics Flurry sees app activity from 1.4 billion devices monthly Flurry sees 5.5 billion app sessions per day Flurry Analytics is in 7 apps per device on average 8,000 publishers monetize with Flurry Flurry works with mobile developers in 150 countries Flurry was an early leader in mobile analytics before becoming an ad platform/network. Both pieces (targeting and reach) are critical to Yahoo’s continued display growth.

what advice he would give to other Twitter advertisers. Here are his suggestions: Always separate mobile and desktop.

Engagement rates and conversion rates will be different between the two and need to be managed accordingly.

Use engagement rates as an early proxy, but they aren’t always a predictor for conversion rates. Wait until you get enough conversion data before making big decisions on segments, copy, etc.

From a bidding perspective, be very hands on, particularly at launch. “If you wait too long to act, the tweet might already be decaying.” Twitter requires very active campaign management. Constantly test. Langrtry says they are always trying new creative and evolving targeting. They exclude poor performing targets, test new audiences and pull out top performing interest and usernames and give them their own budgets.